The Idea of Justice
Amartya Sen
Language: English
Pages: 496
ISBN: 0674060474
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Social justice: an ideal, forever beyond our grasp; or one of many practical possibilities? More than a matter of intellectual discourse, the idea of justice plays a real role in how―and how well―people live. And in this book the distinguished scholar Amartya Sen offers a powerful critique of the theory of social justice that, in its grip on social and political thinking, has long left practical realities far behind.
The transcendental theory of justice, the subject of Sen’s analysis, flourished in the Enlightenment and has proponents among some of the most distinguished philosophers of our day; it is concerned with identifying perfectly just social arrangements, defining the nature of the perfectly just society. The approach Sen favors, on the other hand, focuses on the comparative judgments of what is “more” or “less” just, and on the comparative merits of the different societies that actually emerge from certain institutions and social interactions.
At the heart of Sen’s argument is a respect for reasoned differences in our understanding of what a “just society” really is. People of different persuasions―for example, utilitarians, economic egalitarians, labor right theorists, no-nonsense libertarians―might each reasonably see a clear and straightforward resolution to questions of justice; and yet, these clear and straightforward resolutions would be completely different. In light of this, Sen argues for a comparative perspective on justice that can guide us in the choice between alternatives that we inevitably face.
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through the operation of incentives. Obviously in a world in which individual behaviour is not solely moulded by the ‘conception of justice’ in the original position, there is no way of avoiding incentive problems. * See also Liam Murphy and Thomas Nagel, The Myth of Ownership: Taxes and Justice (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), which applies general ideas of justice to the ideologically loaded battle over tax policy, (p. 4). 60 rawls and beyond On the other hand, if in the original
Rawls himself has gone some distance towards making the priority, in effect, less extreme.17 It is indeed possible to accept that liberty must have some kind of priority, but total unrestrained priority is almost certainly an overkill. There are, for example, many different types of weighting schemes that can give partial priority to one concern over another.† Second, in the difference principle, Rawls judges the opportunities * Similarly, Philippe Van Parijs’s powerful arguments for a basic
the idea of justice to comparative assessments of justice as a kind of ‘by-product’? In particular, could comparisons of ‘distance from transcendence’ at which the different societal arrangements stand be the basis of such comparative assessment? Could the transcendental approach be ‘sufficient’ for yielding much more than what its formal content suggests? Second, if there is a query about sufficiency here, there is also one about necessity. Could it be the case that the transcendental question
indeed useful, to refer to it in judging the relative merits of two other alternatives; for example, we may indeed be willing to accept, with great certainty, that Mount Everest is the tallest mountain in the world, completely unbeatable in terms of stature by any other peak, but that understanding is neither needed, nor particularly helpful, in comparing the peak heights of, say, Mount Kilimanjaro and Mount McKinley. There would be something deeply odd in a general belief that a comparison of
may often be hard to capture in precise axiomatic terms, and yet the need for explicitness, to the extent that can be achieved, must have much dialogic merit. How far to go towards axiomatization cannot but be, to a considerable extent, a matter of judgement in dealing with the competing claims of precise characterization, on the one hand, and the need to take note, on the other, of the complexities that may be hard to axiomatize but which are nevertheless significant concerns that can be usefully